General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Él

Él (Spanish for "He"; also released in English as This Strange Passion and in French as Tourments) is a 1953 Mexican feature film directed by Luis Buñuel, a psychological melodrama about a pathological jealousy that destroys a marriage. Buñuel wrote the screenplay with Luis Alcoriza from the autobiographical 1926 novel El by the Spanish writer Mercedes Pinto, and the film stars Arturo de Córdova as Francisco Galván de Montemayor and Delia Garcés as Gloria.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	Directed by Luis Buñuel; screenplay by Buñuel and Luis Alcoriza, from Mercedes Pinto's autobiographical novel El (1926)¹^•³
Production	Mexico, 1953; 92 minutes, black-and-white, 35 mm; producer Óscar Dancigers; cinematography Gabriel Figueroa; music Luis Hernández Bretón¹^•⁴
Cast	Arturo de Córdova (Francisco Galván de Montemayor), Delia Garcés (Gloria), Aurora Walker, Carlos Martínez Baena¹
Festival and reception	Screened at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival without winning prizes; contemporary Mexican reception was muted, with critical elevation coming later, largely from Europe⁵^•⁶
Author's view	In his 1982 autobiography My Last Sigh, Buñuel called the film "the portrait of a paranoiac, who, like a poet, is born, not made"⁷
Restoration	4K restoration completed in 2022 at L'Immagine Ritrovata from a dupe positive preserved at the Filmoteca de la UNAM, by the Film Foundation's World Cinema Project²

Spoilers

Plot

Francisco Galván de Montemayor, a wealthy, devoutly Catholic middle-aged bachelor, first sees Gloria Vilalta at a church service and becomes fixated on her. She is engaged to another man, Raúl; Francisco pursues her and persuades her to break the engagement and marry him instead.⁸^•⁹

After the wedding, which the film places against a honeymoon in Guanajuato, Francisco's jealousy turns paranoid. He suspects Gloria of infidelity, beats a man he believes was spying on her through a keyhole, keeps her watched in their house, and at times locks her in when he imagines an affair with the young lawyer in his service. Gloria, isolated by her position as a wife in a society that offers her no refuge from her husband or from her family and the church, comes to fear for her life.⁴^•² Francisco's paranoia grows until hallucinations during a church service culminate in an attempt to strangle the priest, and the epilogue shows him confined in a Franciscan monastery.⁵^•¹⁷

Production and context

Buñuel had settled in Mexico in 1946 after leaving Spain and failing to find work in Hollywood, and he directed more than half of his films there, from Gran Casino (1947) through Simón del desierto (1965). His Mexican years coincided with the most prosperous period of Mexican cinema, the época de oro.¹⁰^•¹¹ Él was produced by Óscar Dancigers, Buñuel's regular Mexican producer, with Federico Amérigo as production manager, Gabriel Figueroa as cinematographer, and Carlos Savage as editor.⁴

The source novel was autobiographical: Mercedes Pinto, a Spanish writer, dramatist, and journalist, had drawn on her own marriage. Buñuel incorporated personal material of his own into the adaptation, and was slow to admit how close the film's obsessions were to his own; he said he recognized himself in the pathologically jealous protagonist but observed him, as he put it, like an entomologist watching a beetle zigzag along a road.²^•³^•⁵

Casting Arturo de Córdova, one of the most popular leading men of 1950s Mexican cinema, gave the production star value and respectability, and Buñuel exploited and betrayed the audience's sympathy with a handsome, sympathetic hero. De Córdova, in his only collaboration with Buñuel, delivered what the Mexican film dictionary Perla Ciuk edited calls one of the best performances of his career, incorporating gestures of the director's own, including his way of walking.⁶^•⁴

Reception and afterlife

The film screened at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival and won no prizes; when the Mexican press asked Buñuel about its "failure," he argued defensively that the film was valuable for its illustration of a clinical disorder. By most accounts, the film's box-office performance in Mexico ranged from lukewarm to weak, and some accounts describe moviegoers laughing precisely at the scenes Buñuel meant to be taken most seriously. Its critical elevation came later and largely from Europe.⁵^•⁶

The film's clinical precision registered beyond cinema. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan saw it at a Cinémathèque screening organized for psychiatrists and praised its finesse and clinical accuracy.³ Its bell-tower sequence, in which Francisco's hallucinations take over, is often cited as a precursor of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958); the Spanish film critic Miguel Marías wrote that some images make one wonder whether Hitchcock had seen and recalled Él when filming Vertigo five years later, and SensaCine notes that Hitchcock, an admirer of Buñuel, paid homage to the film in Vertigo.¹²^•¹³

Later critics placed it among Buñuel's best Mexican films. The BFI calls it "one of the finest of the surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel's Mexican films," and the critic Peter William Evans described it as the most elaborate form of Buñuel's exploration of male fetishism, offering "grand guignol spectacles of paranoid jealousy."⁸ On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 100% rating among 12 critics, and Metacritic records a Metascore of 80.¹⁴^•¹⁵

Restoration and distribution

For years the film was difficult to see, for reasons the Austin Film Society describes as obscure questions of film rights.¹⁶ A 4K restoration was carried out in 2022 by the Film Foundation's World Cinema Project, Les Films du Camélia, and Cineteca di Bologna, with the support of OCAS and in association with Películas y Videos Internacionales, funded by the Material World Foundation. It was scanned from a dupe positive preserved by Películas y Videos Internacionales at the Filmoteca de la UNAM, with color grading supervised by Gabriel Figueroa Flores, son of the cinematographer. The restored version began French theatrical release on 2 November 2022 and has since screened at MoMA, the Academy Museum, and other repertory venues.²^•¹²^•³

In Spain, where the film was distributed by Inter Arte Films of Madrid, the ICAA film database records a theatrical gross of 10,023.46 euros from 35,782 admissions, figures that reflect its later circulation there rather than a 1953 Spanish run.¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1950s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?

Él